HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — This week, students in Huntsville City Schools will not be going to school due to a ransomware attack that hit the school system on Monday.
Local and federal authorities remind parents to keep Huntsville City Schools devices turned off during this time and to not log onto school platforms.
Gray Analytics Vice President & General Counsel, Jay Town, says cancelling school is a strategy to help prevent the ransomware from spreading to the devices of students and families.
Ransomware can come from various places like links in e-mails or text messages and can be hard to defeat. How quickly an attack can be defeated can depend on whether it was a click event or a sophisticated hack.
Town says the best way to protect against ransomware is to be proactive.
"We've exercised this great personal hygiene over the last nine months. Our cyber hygiene, we can't use 2015 methods to back up our 2020 or 2021 systems," said Town.
Town says Huntsville is lucky to have a very sophisticated FBI cyber team to investigate this ransomware attack.
WATCH: Huntsville City Schools cancels classes for remainder of week due to cyberthreat